


Sleepless Nights

by PandoraTheExplorer



Series: Month of Drabbles Challenge 2018 [2]
Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alcoholism, Angst, Depression, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Suicide, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers, Survivor Trio, They all need therapy, mentions of self harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-12 22:48:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16004894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PandoraTheExplorer/pseuds/PandoraTheExplorer
Summary: At night, Saihara and Yumeno dream. They wake. They scream. They cry.Maki finds it easier to escape from the dreams altogether.





	Sleepless Nights

**Author's Note:**

> Second story for the 2018 Month of Drabbles Challenge

When he has nightmares, Saihara screams.

Maki would clumsily roll out of bed and stumble into his room on the other side of the hallway. Usually, Yumeno would already be there, violently shaking Saihara’s shoulders and yelling for him to wake up. By the time Maki seats herself on his bed, Saihara would be awake, gasping and muttering names like “Akamatsu-san” or “Momota-kun.” Yumeno would be patting his hand and whispering words of comfort that never had any use. Usually the best thing to do was to wait for Saihara to calm down by himself, however long that would take. 

While they waited, Maki would lay her head on Saihara’s pillow and put her arm around him, while Yumeno snuggled in to bury her face in Saihara’s chest. The fake detective held on to Maki’s hand with one of his own, and squeezed Yumeno’s body to his with his remaining arm, clinging onto both of them like a lifeline. Their apartment would be silent save for Saihara’s shaking breaths and empty pleas for the girls to kill him. Yumeno and Maki would never ask for the contents of his nightmares, nor would they reply to his requests to die with anything more than silence. They would talk about things, sure, things like theories on what their old classmate’s real personalities were like or if Kirumi Tojo ever ate a tide pod or if the three of them were ever really in love with Akamatsu, Chabashira, and Momota. They had no need to talk about Shinguji’s skin melting in a steel cauldron or Gonta spraying blood from his lips or the way Shirogane’s blood and guts splattered-

Maki held Saihara tighter. The three of them would always stay like this for hours, until they woke up in a tangle of limbs in the morning. Maki would sneak away with a splitting headache and rush to the bathroom to vomit, but Saihara and Yumeno would always be in the kitchen to welcome her with breakfast when she got back.

~

When she has nightmares, Yumeno cries.

If she’s aware enough, she would try to muffle her sobs behind a pillow or her comforter. Nevertheless, Saihara is a light sleeper when he’s not trapped in one of his nightmares, and no amount of alcohol to Maki could block out the sound coming from the paper-thin walls of their apartment. Maki would always step through the opened door of Yumeno’s bedroom to find Yumeno already sitting on Saihara’s lap, her crying into his shoulder and him combing through her hair with his fingers. Maki would take Yumeno’s hand and gently pry her fingernails away from the new scratches the smaller girl had surely made on her arms by that point.

One night, Maki surprised herself when she found a tune escaping her lips. After a few verses, she realized that it was a lullaby she never learned from the orphanage she never lived in. Yumeno’s crying stopped momentarily as she turned to stare at Maki in shock. Then she buried her face in Saihara’s shoulder again and adjusted their positions until Yumeno’s head was resting right against Maki’s chest. On the other side of the false mage, Saihara gave Maki an amused look and the pseudo-assassin replied with a look of her own that forbade Saihara from ever doing the same.

The next morning she untangled herself from Yumeno’s arm and Saihara’s legs and staggered to the bathroom to throw up. Mornings were always the worst.

~

Maki doesn’t have nightmares.

She thinks that she used to have them when she and the others first moved in together, but she hasn’t had any dreams since she discovered the liquor store a few blocks down the street. Saihara and Yumeno try to stop her from drinking too much, but Maki has enough money won from the killing game to replace the whiskey that her friends pour down the drain. Just because Saihara and Yumeno couldn’t bear to stop their own nightmares didn’t mean that Maki shouldn’t when she clearly had the power to. The other survivors had no right to stop her from taking off the edges of the sharp, twisted world.

It wasn’t as if the others didn’t have their own escape. Maki didn’t need to have her sleeping pills taken from her because she took twenty in one dose and slit her wrists after like Saihara did a few months ago. Maki didn’t have layers upon layers of jagged red lines running down every limb from fingernails or paper clips or whatever moderately sharp object that Yumeno managed to get her hands on. She was facing dizziness and hangovers with the possibility of a damaged liver. Saihara and Yumeno had no right to judge her for that.  
One night, Maki was staring out her window with a heavy glass bottle in one hand. She had lost track of what time it was but had decided to go to sleep as soon as she finished the bottle. Saihara and Yumeno had both gone to bed early.

The stars were bright in the sky. They formed shapes that Maki herself never bothered to study. She wondered if Gonta would recognize them, if he could see them now. Momota definitely would. He would probably point out every constellation and tell Maki all the myths and fables surrounding them, whether she wanted to or not.

When she closed her eyes, she was back at the trial grounds. The stars left afterimages on the insides of her eyelids. They shone just as brightly as they did every time she exited the trial grounds after the execution of one of her “classmates.” She wondered who died this time. Was it Akamatsu, strung up and crushed by an audience’s expectations and by a piano lid at her final recital? Was it Tojo, sliced open and falling from her hope and desperation and into a cold hard ground? Was it Shinguji, boiled alive by the flames of his misplaced passion and the flames of a suicidal robot? Gonta, stabbed in the back by the friend he thought he could trust and stabbed through the front by an abomination of nature conjured up by a psychotic bear? Momota, with a smile on his face and blood on his lips as he faced the vast expanse of his (false) lifelong dream?

Or was it herself, Saihara, and Yumeno, as they watched the world and their lives crumble around them? As they watched the disappointed Shirogane burst into a mess of pink under a block of stone and Kiibo explode in a burst of light brighter than any hope the mastermind and her writers could ever offer in their stories?

Maki lifted the bottle to her lips again and found that it was empty. Ignoring the promise she made to herself earlier, she stumbled to the not-so-secret stash of whiskey in her closet. As she took a new bottle back to the windowsill to drink, she tripped and the bottle shatters on the floor. Maki swore and pounded her fist on the ground, driving shards of broken glass into her palms.

She tore at her hair and wailed. Why was she still here? Why, after the other thirteen had gone, was she still allowed to sit in this lonely apartment, drowning out her sorrows in tears and liquor? She should have died in the school along with the rest, body crushed under rubble. This new world had no desire to mould itself to fit Maki Harukawa inside it. It would have been better if she had died in a world where she belonged rather than live in one where she did not.

The door to her bedroom opened, and Saihara and Yumeno’s faces poked in, regarding her curiously. Saihara mumbled something about getting the first aid kit and Yumeno stepped into the room to take care of Maki.

Yumeno guided Maki to her bed to sit while Saihara cleaned up the broken glass and spilled alcohol. Maki thought she could see Yumeno slip a shard of glass into the pockets of her pajama pants, but didn’t pay much mind to it. She ran her fingers over the deep grooves on Yumeno’s arm, careful not to press too hard in case there were fresher cuts that haven’t completely healed yet. The texture was comforting.

Saihara brought the first aid kit and stayed with Maki while Yumeno went to find the key to the padlock on the kit that Maki placed there to keep Saihara from reaching the giant bottle of Tylenol. He ran his fingers through her long hair, which was greasy and dirty from weeks of not washing it. After Yumeno returned with the key, Saihara gingerly cleaned the small wounds on Maki’s hands. Yumeno offered her a glass of water.

It was strange, having people care for you like this when they had no reason to at all. Maki was acutely aware of how out of place everything was. It wasn’t fitting that Saihara and Yumeno should fuss over her so much when no one ever had before, both in her fake memories and real. It wasn’t fitting that Maki would feel herself caring about these two, about their well being and their thoughts about her, when she hasn’t cared about anyone else before. Was this newfound compassion a remnant of the killing game?

Maybe it didn’t matter that she was out of place in this world. Because Saihara and Yumeno were out of place too. Together, the three of them could create their own little world to exist in. A world without killing games or robot bears or adoring fans crazed with bloodlust.

Maybe they could just create their own world. Their own world to live in during those sleepless nights.

**Author's Note:**

> I was showing Miaya Gekkogahara to my friend ans said "that's the Ultimate Therapist from Danganronpa" and she said "good they need one of those" and that's accurate. It probably says something about the series thematically when the Ultimate Therapist dies horribly before her killing game even starts.


End file.
